Health care facilities such as nursing homes and assisted living facilities, frequently must administer pharmaceutical products to those individuals in their care, referred to as patients or care recipients hereinafter. Such facilities often rely on commercial pharmacies to provide these pharmaceutical products. These pharmaceutical products are frequently provided to these facilities as patient-specific inventories that consist of multiple-day's worth of dosages. When a new patient enters the care of such a facility there is often a lag between the time that the patient care begins and corresponding pharmaceutical products arrive. The current solution to this lag is to maintain a general inventory of pharmaceutical products at each facility in a divided storage box or other similar container. Some of the difficulties of such a system include: no accountability for access to drug inventory generally; regulatory issues related to access to narcotic drugs kept in such an inventory; maintaining sufficient inventory levels; and billing associated with dispensed drugs.
The present disclosure is directed to a drug and medical supply dispensation cart that may be connected using wired or wireless communications technology to a system and database that may track the inventory on such a cart, allow configurations of such a cart that are optimized for the site at which the cart is located, permit local user access to be managed by at least one administrative user located at the site or remotely, enable automated restocking and other remote management and configuration functions as described in more detail herein.